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Power-law scaling and fractal nature of medium-range order in metallic glasses

Nature Materials volume 8, pages 30–34 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

The atomic structure of metallic glasses has been a long-standing scientific problem. Unlike crystalline metals, where long-range ordering is established by periodic stacking of fundamental building blocks known as unit cells, a metallic glass has no long-range translational or orientational order, although some degrees of short- and medium-range order do exist1,2,3. Previous studies1,2,3,4 have identified solute- (minority atom)-centred clusters as the fundamental building blocks or short-range order in metallic glasses. Idealized cluster packing schemes, such as efficient cluster packing on a cubic lattice1 and icosahedral packing3 as in a quasicrystal, have been proposed and provided first insights on the medium-range order in metallic glasses. However, these packing schemes break down beyond a length scale of a few clusters. Here, on the basis of neutron and X-ray diffraction experiments, we propose a new packing scheme—self-similar packing of atomic clusters. We show that the medium-range order has the characteristics of a fractal network with a dimension of 2.31, and is described by a power-law correlation function over the medium-range length scale. Our finding provides a new perspective of order in disordered materials and has broad implications for understanding their structure–property relationship, particularly those involving a change in length scales.

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Figure 1: Power-law scaling of the FSDP (q1) versus atomic volume (va) for a variety of metallic glasses.
Figure 2: Correlation between FSDP and MRO.
Figure 3: Demonstration of fractal packing with experimental [g(r)−1].

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Acknowledgements

We thank Z. P. Lu and M. J. Kramer for providing the metallic-glass samples, H. Bei for help in density measurements and S. E. Nagler for helpful discussions. This research was supported by US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC.

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  1. Neutron Scattering Science Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA

    D. Ma, A. D. Stoica & X.-L. Wang

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  1. D. Ma
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Correspondence to X.-L. Wang.

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Ma, D., Stoica, A. & Wang, XL. Power-law scaling and fractal nature of medium-range order in metallic glasses. Nature Mater 8, 30–34 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2340

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